the garden lies unblinking around me ..

Sometimes the garden lies unblinking around me, its eyes greedily following my every step, wanting to consume each waking hour.

Parsnip seed sown into cardboard tubes.

Those of us deemed 'the sandwich generation' know how our time is sucked away. Today my energy is low, as is the sky above me. It is grey and building for rain.

The winter aconites and snowdrops finished flowering early this year due to the unseasonal heat of February. The foliage of over seventy aconites now runs along the drive border: hundreds of outstretched green hands reaching up through the leaf mulch. Snowdrops are at the stage when we should split the large clumps to ensure that they flower even more abundantly and are even more widespread in the Woodland Garden next spring.

In the Vegetable Garden there is much wheelbarrow trudging to be done: mulching our no-dig beds. I worked out in a quiet moment that the Vegetable Garden alone requires seventy barrow loads. As Charles Dowding pointed out during his inspirational talk in Nottingham last week, in a perfect world this would have been done in the autumn as we are currently sowing seeds for the coming year and the ground must be ready. Last weekend we sowed into trays and modules:

1. Peas - Feltham First
2. Onions - White Lisbon
3. Parsnips - Tender & True
4. Lettuce - Cocarde; Little Gem; Salad Bowl; Red Salad Bowl; Lobjoits Green Cos; Mixuna
5. Rainbow chard
6. Parsley (plain leaved)
7. Beetroot - Boltardy

When the weather warms I'm hoping that dad can join me hoeing and raking. We'll need to take care though. He came onto the lawn to supervise our work in the borders last week and within a moment of me turning my back he went down. No injury  - and executed with an almost balletic grace.

Rhubarb 'Timperley Early' is flourishing - 700g picked today, roasted in the oven, sweetened and combined with sliced banana in a a tray bake. 

Banana and rhubarb tray bake

This is our first year using LED lighting to promote seedling plant growth. The small unit is set on a tripod in the warmth of our appropriately named plant room and is being trialled raising ricinus seedlings.

We have finished planting the border we developed with our WWOOF volunteer in January: 'Rosa's Border'. The mulching with wood chippings was finally completed today. Central to the new planting is a Cornus kousa 'Miss Satomi'. This should be a stunning summer addition after it has settled in.

Jill continues to slog through the Prairie Beds, removing weeds. We will burn the pampas grass to remove dead growth and stimulate new having checked first that it isn't a home to mammals or birds. Jill found an elaborately woven pampas grass seed head that we believe may have been the work of one of our introduced harvest mice.

Brambling, siskin, goldfinch and lesser redpoll on the 'mother feeder'

It is that time between winter and spring when we get the avian benefits of both seasons. To drive down the drive is to be welcomed by the sound of crowds of singing birds. Today, one of the female blackbirds we'd ringed was collecting nesting material beneath the mother feeder. Above her, an unending stream of bramblings, goldfinches, grass green siskins and rhubarb pink lesser redpolls dropped to the feeder from the trees behind. It seems we're running an 'all you can eat' holiday destination for North European finches at the moment.

At breakfast time a cock house sparrow 'chips' away to announce his presence in the colony box above the kitchen door. I first attempted to attract our dwindling house sparrows to use colony boxes twenty years ago. God loves a trier: I'm within weeks of my first success.

Our little grandson seems especially aware of bird song. That's my boy...